UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Wini Breines, you are a brave woman.” I shared this sentiment with her during the Q&A portion of the talk she gave on her November 6th visit to UCLA. Dr. Winifred Breines, Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Northeastern University, had come to speak about her new book The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. The crowd in Royce Hall that afternoon was a diverse mixture of students, young faculty, more seasoned feminist scholars, and older activists who had directly participated in the movements about which Breines had written. Women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds had come to hear Breines share her perspective on how race influenced the development of the women’s movement. Her book analyzes a mixture of archival data, memoirs, primary and secondary accounts, interviews, and conversations to construct a story of white and black feminist racial politics in the late 1960s and 1970s.